Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

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Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2015
 Jonathan Swift
Virginia Woolf

1. Life (1882-1941)
• Her father Leslie Stephen was
an eminent Victorian man of letters.

• She grew up in a literary and intellectual

atmosphere with free access to her father’s
library.
Virginia Woolf with her father.

• Her childhood experience of her mother’s death, when she was

only 13, led her to depression.

• In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf.

• She spent her summers in St Ives, Cornwall, and the sea, which
is often present in her novels, became an important symbol.

It represented what is It represented death and

harmonious and the resolution of intolerable
feminine conflicts

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 Jonathan Swift
Virginia Woolf

1. Life (1882-1941)
Suicide
Her life was characterized by mental instability.
She first attempted suicide by taking drugs.

The Second World War increased her anxiety and fears.

After rewriting drafts of her suicide note, she put rocks into
her pockets and drowned herself in the River Ouse.

Virginia Woolf.

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 Jonathan Swift
Virginia Woolf

2. Literary career
The Bloomsbury Group  in 1904 she moved to Bloomsbury
and became a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Its members were
writers and painters who rejected traditional morality and artistic
conventions.
Experimentation  best known as one of the great experimental
novelists during the modernist period.
She was also a very talented literary critic and wrote some brilliant
essays (collected in The Common Reader – 1925).

She was one of the first feminist writers. She

insisted on the inseparable link between
economic independence and artistic
independence of women. Some of her essays
had a great impact on the feminist movement
of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Bloomsbury Group: Auberon Duckworth; Duncan Grant; Julian
Bell; Leonard Woolf. Front: Virginia Woolf; Lady Margaret Duckworth;
Clive Bell; Vanessa Bell.
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 Jonathan Swift
Virginia Woolf

2. Literary career
The Voyage Out Traditional narrative technique
(1915)

Jacob’s Room Narrative experimentation with the novel

(1922)

Mrs Dalloway A more completely developed ‘stream-of-

(1925) consciousness technique’

To the Lighthouse A more completely developed ‘stream-of-

(1927) consciousness technique’

Orlando (1928) Deals with androgyny

A Room of One’s Shows Woolf’s concern with the questions

Own (1929) of women’s subjugation and the
Collection of essays relationship between women and writing
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 Jonathan Swift
Virginia Woolf

3. A modernist novelist
• Main aim  to give voice to the complex inner
world of feeling and memory (see quotation on page
270).

• The human personality  a continuous

shift of impressions and emotions. So the events that
make up a story are no longer important, what matters
are the impressions they make on the characters.

• Narrator  disappearance of the omniscient narrator.

• Point of view  inside the characters’ minds

through flashbacks, associations of ideas, momentary
Vanessa Bell, Mrs St John Hutchinson, 1915,
impressions presented as a continuous flow. Tate Gallery, London.

• Poetic prose  she used words in a very poetic, allusive and

emotional way. Fluidity is the quality of her language (which flows
following thoughts and feelings)
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 Jonathan Swift
Virginia Woolf

4. Woolf vs Joyce

WOOLF’S STREAM JOYCE’S STREAM

OF CONSCIOUSNESS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

never lets her characters show their thoughts

characters’ thoughts flow directly through interior
without control; monologue, sometimes in an
maintains logical and incoherent and syntactically
grammatical organisation unorthodox way

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 Jonathan Swift
Virginia Woolf

4. Woolf vs Joyce

MOMENTS OF BEING EPIPHANIES

Rare moments of insight The sudden spiritual

during the characters’ manifestation caused by a trivial
daily life when they can gesture, an external object  the
see reality behind character is led to a self-
appearances realisation about himself/herself

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 Jonathan Swift
Virginia Woolf

5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)

• The main character, Clarissa Dalloway, is a wealthy
London hostess. She spends her day preparing for
her evening party. She recalls her life before World
War I, before her marriage to Richard Dalloway, and her
relationship with Peter Walsh.

• Septimus Smith is a shell-shocked veteran,

one of the first Englishmen to enlist in the war.
He is married to Lucrezia, an Italian woman.

• The climax is Clarissa’s party: it gathers all the

people Clarissa thinks about during the day.
It is at the party that Dr Bradshaw, the nerve
specialist, speaks about Septimus’s suicide.

• Woolf is able to show the deep humanity of her

characters behind their social mask.

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 Jonathan Swift
Virginia Woolf

5. Mrs Dalloway: setting

• Set on a single ordinary day in June 1923.

• It follows the protagonist through a very

small area of London.

• The characters enjoy the sights and

sounds of London, its parks, its
changing life.

• Through what Woolf defined as the

‘tunnelling technique’, she allows the
reader to experience the characters’
recollection of their past and thus to know
their personal history. Mrs Dalloway’s walk from Dean’s Yard,
Westminster, to Bond Street.

• Clarissa Dalloway’s party is the climax

of the novel.

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 Jonathan Swift
Virginia Woolf

5. Mrs Dalloway:
a changing society
Significant changes in the social life of the
time represented in the novel:
•the spread of newspapers
•the increasing use of cars and planes
•the new standards in the marital relationship
•the success of the cinema

A motif the striking of Big Ben

and of clocks in general: it’s a structural
connection and a symbol. It reminds the
reader of chronological time passing by.

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 Jonathan Swift
Virginia Woolf

5. Mrs Dalloway: characters

MRS DALLOWAY
• She is fifty-one
• The wife of a Conservative MP, Richard Dalloway, who
has conventional views on politics and women’s rights.
She experienced:
• the influence of a possessive father,
• the frustration of a genuine love,
(having refused Peter Walsh)

All this has weakened her emotional self. Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs Dalloway.

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 Jonathan Swift
Virginia Woolf

5. Mrs Dalloway: characters

MRS DALLOWAY
She is characterised by opposing feelings:

Her need Her class

for freedom and consciousness
independence

To overcome her weakness

and sense of failure, she
imposes severe restrictions on
her spontaneous feelings.

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 Jonathan Swift
Virginia Woolf

5. Mrs Dalloway: characters

SEPTIMUS WARREN SMITH

•An extremely sensitive man.

•He can suddenly fall prey to
panic and fear, or feelings of guilt
for the death of his best friend,
Evans, during the war.
•He is a ‘shell-shock’ case,
a victim of industrialised war.
•He is haunted by the spectre
of Evans, he suffers from
headaches and insomnia.
•He cannot stand the idea Actor Rupert Graves plays the role of Septimus
Warren Smith in the 1997 film ‘Mrs Dalloway’.
of having a child, he is
sexually impotent.
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 Jonathan Swift
Virginia Woolf
5. Mrs Dalloway:
Clarissa vs Septimus
MRS DALLOWAY
• She responds to experience in
physical terms.
• She depends upon her husband
for stability and protection.
• She never loses her awareness
of the outside world as
something external to herself.
• She finally recognises her
deceptions, accepts old age and
the idea of death, and is ready
to go on.
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SEPTIMUS SMITH
• He responds to experience in
physical terms.
• He depends upon his wife for
stability and protection.
• He is not always able to
distinguish between his personal
response and the nature of
external reality.
• His psychic paralysis leads him
to suicide.
 Jonathan Swift
Clarissa and Septimus page 272

This passage opens with Mrs Dalloway entering the flower shop in Bond Street to buy
flowers.
• In the first part (lines 1-25) the reader is put directly into Mrs Dalloway’s mind,
following her thoughts and associations of ideas while she’s smelling the flowers,
looking at them and at Mrs Pym. There are a lot of references to the senses, especially
smell and sight, but also hearing and touch. Woolf is able to insert into this flow of
thoughts also a brief physical description of the character (line 3:she advanced light,
tall, very upright…) and some specific time details of that day ( line 16: summer day;
line 17: between six and seven).
• The second part (lines 26-44) refers to the main event in the passage: a violent
explosion (due to the bursting tyre of a car). Instead of describing the event, Woolf
describes various people’s reactions to the explosion. The car is surrounded by
mystery. A very important person must be in it, but nobody knows because of the
window-blinds. A very important place detail is given in lines 35-35: from the middle
of Bond street to Oxford Street…

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 Jonathan Swift

• In lines 45-49 Septimus Warren Smith is introduced and described.

• Lines 50 – 62 describe a busy traffic road and Septimus’s thoughts. We find a
lot of references to the new technologies introduced in the 20th century: the
throb of the motor engines, omnibuses, traffic accumulated…
Septimus is presented as very confused, afraid of what’s happening around him.
He even feels guilty because he’s afraid of blocking the traffic.
• The last part (lines63-86) focuses on the description of Lucrezia, Septimus’s
Italian wife, and her thoughts: she is concerned about what people may think of
her and her husband.

NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE: in this passage the voice of the narrator appears

occasionally among the subjective thoughts of the characters. The point of view
shifts constantly from one character’s stream of consciousness to another.
Woolf follows the interior thoughts of characters (interior monologue).
She wants to convey reality through subjective impressions and emotions.

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